Jennifer Bauer has heartbreaking reasons for distancing
herself from the church. Her mother had been acutely unhappy in her second
marriage. When she lamented to the women at her nondenominational church, Bauer
remembers they told her, “She just needs to read the Bible more. She just needs
to pray harder.” The formerly vibrant, outgoing woman became smaller as she
tried to defer to her husband. She made multiple suicide attempts.
Bauer
was heading off to college around the time her mother decided she was getting a
divorce. Her only friends, those from church, cut her mother off. In the split,
her assets were frozen and she lost custody of her children. She died with a
final suicide attempt in 1999.
Her
funeral was “the straw that broke my back as far as saying, I want nothing to
do with religion,” Bauer says. At the funeral, the pastor blamed the devil—claimed
her mother had let evil forces take over her life. He couldn’t see the pain she
had carried nor how the church had contributed. He implied her mother was in
hell. Her grandmother, a Catholic, said so outright.
At
first, Bauer struggled with guilt over leaving for college, feeling like she’d
abandoned her mom. She read two years of her mother’s journals, reading how
she’d pleaded with God to allow her to feel loved.
Bauer attended a United Church of
Christ for a few years, but real healing only came when she started studying
energy modalities (Reiki is one popular example).
It was
at that point that breakthrough finally arrived. She started having personal
experiences connecting with higher powers—what she describes as “ascended
masters,” an idea with roots in theosophy that describes figures like Jesus and
Buddha as historic people who became enlightened.
For
Bauer, that change was transformative.
“I actually sat right here on my
little meditation pillow,” she told me, and with her eyes closed and third eye
open, she said she saw Jesus in front of her. He held her, and she cried. She
felt the places in her body where she had been holding anger and resentment
against Christianity and Catholicism dissolve, and she felt herself merge with
Jesus. Once she felt entirely clear of that trauma, she says, Jesus stepped
back out of her body and stood before her.
Today, Bauer works as a certified
coach and energy worker and healer.
During those healings, she calls in spirit guides and light beings: various
archangels, or one called the Overlighting Deva of All Healing. About half of
the people she works with are healing from trauma related to their Christian
upbringings. A few suffered abuse; most witnessed Christian patriarchal
control, unchecked misogyny, or prejudice against LGBTQ+ people or people of
color.
“I don’t believe any religion
should be teaching people to hate themselves or that they’re unworthy of love.
That’s not God,” Bauer says. “In my lived experiences now, I feel God within
myself and within everything around me. It’s pure love and peace.”
While the circumstances of her
break with the church may be unique, Bauer is among millions of people who have
disaffiliated with Christian churches in the United States in recent years.
According to Pew Research Center, Christian self-identification dropped
from 78 percent to 62 percent between 2007 and 2024. Today, religious “nones” (those
identifying themselves as atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular) are
now more
prevalent, at 28 percent, than Catholics (23 percent) or evangelical Protestants (24 percent).
Until recent decades, the U.S. had remained uniquely religious among Western nations. Now, however, the
country may finally be doing what many nations did generations
ago—secularizing.
Sociologists of religion have
numerous theories about how and why cultures secularize, but the granddaddy of
these theses came from sociologist Max Weber, who used modern,
post-Enlightenment, Protestant Europe as a paradigm for how with increasing
rationalization and intellectualization, people will quit allowing themselves
to be motivated by religious or magical thinking. (Scientific explanations win
out over superstition.) As these disenchanted people’s institutions became more
entangled with capitalism, Weber thought, they would instead get stuck in an
“iron cage,” like efficient cogs in the machinery of modern bureaucracy and
economic systems.
But in the U.S., a lot of people are
peeling off from traditional religious denominations and following a different
path—rediscovering ancestral faith or rewriting Christian religion or becoming pagan
witches. Many demystifying Americans, like Bauer, are leaving the church but, rather
than becoming strictly secular, are embracing a sort of choose-your-own-adventure
spirituality.
A recent longitudinal study in Socius,
the American Sociological Association’s journal, followed a cohort of 1,348
people born in the late 1980s and found that while institutional involvement in
religion is declining, many people still reported praying. Their belief in God
remained fairly steady. Their practice of meditation actually increased.
People with more liberal views and
those who believe in same-sex marriage and that abortion should be legal tended
to withdraw from the church in higher numbers (though there was a decline in
church attendance and affiliation across the political spectrum). In
qualitative interviews, respondents explained their choice to leave religion
was motivated by deeply held values—such as LGBTQ rights. The study subjects
also came of age during the rise of the Christian right, a dubious alignment
that helped funnel votes and dollars for Republican political causes even as megachurch
pastor after pastor
fell to sex and abuse scandals. Talk about disenchantment.
The horrific scale of the Catholic
and Southern
Baptist sex abuse scandals and cover-up gave ample just cause for many
believers to question church leaders.
But as researchers found, leaving
the institutional church doesn’t necessarily mean quitting faith. In fact, as
the Socius article notes, “for some, it takes losing religion to find
themselves spiritually.” People are breaking free from the iron cage of
institutional religion, as the Socius piece suggests, “not with bolt
cutters but with deeply personal acts of spiritual rebellion.”
Bee Smith, a community organizer
based in Galveston, Texas, was largely guarded from religion as a kid, due to
her parents’ earlier experience in a Christian cult. Her most lasting spiritual
event was what she considers a near-death experience at age 12, in which her
great-grandmother and other “light beings”—whom she understood to be her female
ancestors—showed her a staircase. It was not fully constructed, and her
great-grandmother told her it was important she not give up in this life
because what she built would help the women in their family who came after her.
She woke up screaming, hearing her
great-grandmother insist she tell her mother that her stomach hurt. It took
weeks to find, but it turned out she had a cyst the size of a cantaloupe
“hemorrhaging and full of blood clots” on her right ovary.
Rather than an eerie miracle story,
the memory became a way to survive. Smith says she became a sexual abuse victim
of the doctor who treated her. She held on because of the memory of her
ancestors telling her she should not give up.
Her family moved to Kentucky when
she was 14, and though she attended a Southern Baptist church, she read the
Bible with an interest in Jesus’s social justice convictions. As she read the
Bible, she found herself always “trying to fill in the gaps.” She imagined how
the narrative might fill out if the perspectives of the women in the stories
were not ignored.
Through creative writing, she has
reimagined the figures of Lilith, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, mother of Jesus.
She considers Lilith, recalled in Jewish mythology as Adam’s disobedient first
wife, instead a goddess; Mary Magdalene is a Christ-like figure, a female
counterpart and divine in her own right. She lets Lilith, for example, “be her
full divine self in the stories that I write about other women who are
overcoming abuse.” She creates little rituals. She’ll put on “wild music and
dance alone.” Maybe she’ll smoke a little weed and get herself into a trance
state, light candles, stare at the flame, “and try to open up a space in my
mind where I can see beyond the veil.”
Before she quit the church, Smith
told her former pastor that “the church needs to lose its walls if it wants to
find its soul.” She had been inspired by the idea of the church being the body
of God, which seeks out those in need.
“I would just rather be a free
agent and try to be the church,” she says, than attend one that doesn’t
care for those who need it. As a community organizer, Smith works mostly with
atheists, agnostics, and people who have been abused by the church, “but we’re
literally doing the work of God.”
Certainly,
there are theologians who would balk at the idea of treating Mary Magdalene as
coequal with Jesus or seeing divinity in Jewish folklore’s Lilith (sometimes described
as a demoness). The defining characteristics of religious institutions and
denominations often come down to shared creeds, interpretations, and beliefs. If
adoption of doctrine makes you belong, there’s nothing barring those who leave
from cutting away the old rules but hanging onto whatever symbols bring
personal meaning (at least, now that we no longer live in a time when such people
are regularly burned as heretics).
Such spiritual
borrowing is nothing new; in fact, it’s part of how cultures and religions
spread their message. In Bath,
England, the old Celtic goddess Sulis was strategically associated with the
Roman goddess Minerva, which helped transfer Roman religious ideas. Ask any
pagan about the history of Easter and you’ll get an earful about the
Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, bunny rabbits, and eggs as pagan symbols of
fertility and rebirth. Fourth-century Romans already celebrated the rebirth of
Sol Invictus (the sun god) on December 25, and there’s reasonable evidence that
under the Emperor Constantine, who himself converted to Christianity and spread
the faith, December 25 was chosen
as the date for celebrating Christmas in order to help eclipse the pagan
holiday.
The more Christianity organized and
systematized over generations, “the more it tried to get rid of some of these
pagan or syncretistic or indigenous or localized practices,” notes the Socius
study’s lead researcher, Landon Schnabel, sociologist at Cornell
University. “It never really succeeded,”
particularly, for example, in Latin America, which “has localized and
indigenous practices that still make it in and get combined with Catholicism.”
Instead of replacing them, those folk
religions often exist as an undercurrent, and many Americans are now interested
in rediscovering them, peeling off the Christian or institutional layer.
During colonial times, various
syncretic spiritualities had to “hide their practices behind the mirror of
Catholicism,” notes Odalis Garcia Gorra, a writer and doctoral student at
University of Texas, Austin. “If you think about Santeria,” an Afro-Caribbean
faith that blends Yoruba (West African) and Catholic beliefs, “the saints were
syncretized with the Orishas,” a pantheon of Yoruban deities,
Garcia Gorra notes.
Garcia Gorra studies the rise of
Latinx digital communities, especially brujapreneurs—witches carving out
sacred space on Instagram. Representative among them is Bri Luna, The Hoodwitch
and author of Blood,
Sex, Magic; she has 481,000 followers and blends Tarot, the Virgin
Mary, astrology, and recently, the pagan holiday Beltane. The content is
feminine, gothic, luxurious.
Garcia Gorra notes how often
followers of this sort of witchy aesthetic include young women and gender-nonconforming people, queer people. Often, they are second- or third-generation
children of immigrants, reaching for connection with the beliefs of their
ancestors. They seem to want to get away from a colonizing form of faith they
grew up with and dig for the history underneath that was pushed down by the
church.
For descendants of diasporic
communities, “enslaved peoples or colonized peoples, there’s a point where the
family tree ends, right? There’s no record.” Better understanding brujeria or
hoodoo, for example, could offer a connection to the spiritual life of one’s
ancestors and bring with it a rootedness in time and spirit when a connection
to the modern church has been severed.
“It’s both very new but also very
old that people are looking back to these things that religion tried to stamp
out,” says Schnabel. Sometimes their new practice is “actually more spiritual
or more supernatural.”
“How would
I articulate what it means to me to be a witch?” Sara Moslener, a professor of American
evangelicalism, religion, and sexuality at Central Michigan University, ponders.
She has spent much of her adult life intellectualizing faith and holds a
master’s degree in feminist theology and a doctorate in Christian history. For
Moslener, an “exvangelical” who was raised in Calvinist purity culture, dismantling
the harmful parts of her faith didn’t leave much behind. She knows she’s not
alone. For her forthcoming book, After
Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America, she
interviewed 65 exvangelicals. Some told her about dismantling their childhood
faith and today becoming “witchy,” or “Christian but witchy,” or “Buddhist and
also kind of witchy,” which for people raised with a conservative, inerrantist
interpretation of the Bible is both a jump and a sign of liberation. The
capacity to integrate and accept a variety of spiritual ideas is in direct
contrast to the absolutism of their faith of birth.
For
Moslener herself, deconstruction—and depression—started one year when she was working at
church camp during college. She’d grown up “so certain, to the point of
arrogance, that I knew what the truth was,” Moslener says. It was a jolt to
realize she was not and could not flourish in the form of Christianity
in which she’d been raised.
It took
years to grapple with the spiritual shift; by 2012, Moslener was really
struggling. At the end of the semester, as the days grew shorter, she began to
associate winter and darkness with death. At that point, death seemed like a
viable option. “I just did not see a future.”
In 2019,
Moslener went on a folklore tour of Ireland, the land of some of her ancestors.
Her group traipsed across western Ireland looking at sacred geography, hearing
about its connection to feminine figures in Celtic spirituality. This is where
she learned about the Cailleach—a Gaelic, divine crone figure associated with
winter. Once home, she created an altar to Cailleach; spent time contemplating
her stories.
Over time, Moslener started to see
“darkness as a place to do important work, be able to go to those deep places,
which for me feels like a beautiful piece of permission.” She began to see
winter as a time to do “shadow work,” an exploration that she says for some people
“is very Jungian.” Winter has become for her the time to “sink into a place
where you can receive those messages from those deeper parts of yourself.”
The Cailleach gave her a framework
for exploring the nature of the darkness within, the depression that has vexed her
for years. On the other side, “the change to my nervous system was palpable.”
She
rotates other feminine figures through her altar for the seasons. Around
Halloween and All Saints’ Day, she also creates an altar that includes her
grandmother and a dear friend, both of whom have passed away. She doesn’t do spells or
really have a definition of “magic,” other than the wonder of seeing things grow
in her yard this time of year.
Tarot,
which she considers intuitive prompts, has given her an outlet for ways of
thinking that differ from her academic role and the rigidity of her childhood
faith, where, to her view, Christianity “is about suppressing your intuition
and having an obedience to an outside source.”
At some point, she realized she
wasn’t merely interested in or curious about this form of spirituality. It
wasn’t just an academic lark. “There was an actual transformation.” She was a
pagan. And like the fresh fronds in her yard, she was growing, thriving,
healing.
The post The Americans Who Quit the Church to Become Witches—Among Other Things appeared first on New Republic.
